eruthros

Are there songs about dorks?

So m_shell and I are talking about the new x-ray airport scanner thing, and how it's creepy for more reasons than that it can see through your clothes. After all, we can only take the word of the company about how it works, we agree.

I draw an analogy to computer voting machines: it's a big, sleek box with a bunch of stuff inside, a who-knows-what-it-does machine. Creepy opaqueness.

In other dorkish news, I have discovered QI and want to know why none of y'all told me about this years ago. It's like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, except on television and featuring people like John Sessions (whose facial structure has changed incredibly in the last ten years) and Hugh Laurie and whoever all else. Talking about whether you would want a hug from a giant anteater, and what Caravaggio's real name was, and all that, and hosted by Stephen Fry who does voices and makes silly faces. AWESOME.

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Oh! And. I collect songs that reference famous philosophers and academics, because why not?

My favorite recent addiction is the Prince Myshkin's Doctor Laura Polka, which references about everybody. There's a Freud and Jung and Lacan verse, for example. But the real reason I care is that they mention Walter Benjamin. And the "aura." As in:

Libertines and disco queens were mean to Doctor LauraSo she called up Walter Benjamin, who said to her: "Senora,When they put you on that TV screen you signed away your aura,You won't bore us anymore because you're going off the air."

And of course there's Mike Ladd's hip-hop/new jazz Field Work (The Ethnographer's Daughter) which is very non-linear, but also probably the only song to reference Malinowski and Michel Leiris. Also available free on the 'net, somewhere.

Pavlov's daughter woke up in the morningHeard the bell ringAnd something deep inside of her made her want to salivateSo she lay there drooling on her pillow

Other songs include: The Weakerthan's "Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961)" which mentions Derrida but not Foucault (because we're talking to Foucault)Misery Index's "My Untold Apocalypse" (Foucault is laughing / this tragedy that you created so young / yet rotting)Googol Bordello's "Start Wearing Purple (So yeah, I know it all / from Diogenes to Foucault / from Lozgechkin to Paspartu)Belle and Sebastian's "Marx and Engels" (If it couldn't see / that the girl just wants to be / left alone with Marx and Engels for a while)John Lennon's ridiculous "Serve Yourself" (Well, you may believe in Jesus, and you may believe in Marx / And you may believe in Marks and Spencer's and you may believe in bloody Woolworths)Neil Diamond's ridiculous "Done Too Soon," which is basically a list of famous people. Karl Marx! Poe! Rousseau! Buster Keaton! etc.

Anyway, if any of y'all can think of some fabulous songs referencing Lukacs or Judith Butler or obscure literary theorists or whatever, I would happily take their names, because I want a huge playlist. And because I am a dork.

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Oh, and, just for fun, wordorigins on the word "dork." This may be a folk etymology, but it's still great.